Connie Rahe: Wake up and smell the dangers of confined feeding operations

Wake up, Delaware County residents; every one of you will be impacted if our county becomes a targeted site for confined feeding operations (CFOs) as other counties have become.

BSU professor James Rybarczyk testified that proposed zoning regulations are not based on scientific recommendations. The Planning Committee heard testimony that the lopsided committee assigned to develop safeguard regulations had not met the standards other urban counties have adopted. Repeatedly they were asked to either table the proposed regulations or deny them so better regs could be developed by a new committee representative of the citizens of this county, rather than being stacked with farming interests assigned by our county commissioners.

Farming interests have repeatedly compared us to Jay County and others with an average of 6 people per square mile, while Delaware Co has more than 17 people per square mile, an “urban” population density more like Madison County. What’s the difference? Ask the people of Muncie who on Oct. 25 smelled such an “agricultural stench” that a Ball Hospital operation room nurse testified it presented a problem for a patient who needed to be sedated for surgery.

Jay, Randolph and most of Blackford counties have been designated as having heavily polluted water, according to the Indiana Department of Natural Resources map.

When will citizens recognize that committees and commissioners are packed with private interest representatives who have taken the ignored 2008 proposed zoning regs and cut such things as distances between hog buildings and already established homes in half - even further reducing the protections these officials are mandated to provide citizens of our county?

I have lived in a small community for 45 years, yet we are treated as if we are intruding on “right to farm” laws by landowners not living there but wanting to build four buildings, each the size of a football field where 10,560 hogs will be housed, blowing heavier-than-air polluting gasses into the valley where we live. Hog CFO farms will be required to be distanced a mile from each other as protections for the hogs because of these noxious gasses emitted from the buildings, according to one testimony, but human beings will not be afforded the same protections.

“Zoning areas” will not provide protections from gasses that are blown miles by the wind and manure-filled fields not regulated by these proposed zoning regs. Any clusters of homes in our “bedroom communities” are at risk from the slanted zoning regulations this bogus committee has drawn up.

Wake up, Delaware County, and demand the county commissioners develop regs like those from other urban counties, such as Hamilton County. Don’t wait until we are as polluted as Lake St Mary in Celina, Ohio, where water is so polluted they are already trucking the manure here to try to reclaim their stinking environment, polluted by out-of-state interests with Big Money who buy off farmers to pollute their neighbors.

Call the county commissioners at 765-747-7740 to leave a statement.or write mmoody@co.delaware.in.us